We’re starting September with Teamwork Projects user Jay Baer, President of Convince & Convert, who shares how he and the company use Teamwork Projects. Though he’s based in Bloomington, Indiana, USA, the company is virtual, all across the country. Jay has been helping hundreds of companies put their best strategies forward for over 20 years and was listed as the top digital marketer retweeted most according to Leadtail and PunchTab. Jay said to us about his work, “It’s constantly changing and evolving. You never master something like digital marketing, you just try to hang on for the ride!”

The key to success with Convince & Convert is that the company works with its clients to help them develop skills and strategy. They’re training companies to fish for themselves which benefits everyone. The Convince & Convert blog is ranked as the world’s #1 content marketing resource by the Content Marketing Institute. Aside from Convince & Convert’s work and Jay Baer’s leadership of the company, we are also fans because they’re Teamwork.com customers for about two years now! But we’ll let Jay tell you about that experience himself.

What low-tech approach to tasks do you love?

Jay Baer: Most of the time I use Teamwork Projects to keep track of what I’m doing and when, but I’m still a big user of sticky notes for simple things I need to remember. Sometimes, it looks like my desk was attacked by them.

What are your biggest time management demands?

Jay Baer: I travel about 50% of the time. So when I’m on the road, it’s a challenge to schedule telephone calls, Webinars, and meetings. And then when I’m off the road, I have about 10 calls per day. So it’s a balance between keeping my schedule open on days when I’m traveling and giving presentations, and keeping my schedule packed on days when I’m not traveling.

What approach helps you achieve work-life balance?

Jay Baer: Whenever I can, I take my family with me. I’m writing this on a plane (and then another plane. and another plane. and another plane) coming home from a trip in Australia and New Zealand. My wife was with me for almost all of it.

Why did you choose Teamwork Projects to help run your business?

Jay Baer: We had used a previous product from a competitor, but I did a platform review and found Teamwork Projects to be a much better fit for us, especially with the way it handles task assignments and process steps.

In what department or way do you use Teamwork Projects?

Jay Baer: Every department. We are a boutique consultancy that provides social media strategy, content marketing strategy, and digital marketing strategy to some of the largest companies in the world. We also have a fast-growing media division that produces many blogs, podcasts, email products, books, ebooks, virtual training and more. Teamwork Projects (called Twerk in our in-house shorthand) is the nerve center for the entire operation. We literally could not operate the business without Teamwork Projects.

What you like about Teamwork Projects? What are your favorite features?

Jay Baer: The notifications are terrific, and I love the balance between notebooks, discussions, links, files, etc. It’s all very relevant and easy to understand. But the key feature for me – and why we switched to Twerk originally – is the ability to use task templates and have them work backwards from a completion date. Because for us, we often know the finish date first and work backwards from there. Twerk supports this, and many/most other systems do not. For example, I have a presentation at the United Nations in Rome soon. My team and I knew the date of that presentation three months ago. That’s our starting point. We create a project in Twerk with a completion date that matches the presentation date. Then, using our task template for that kind of project, Teamwork Projects automatically schedules and assigns all the tasks working backwards from that date. The day before, we send the meeting planner my biography via email. Seven days before we send them our audio-visual requirements, etc. etc. We have similar systems for our blog, our podcasts, our emails, and even our consulting services.

Would you recommend it to other businesses?

Jay Baer: Absolutely. I recommend Teamwork Projects all the time, especially to people who know they need something different or who have outgrown the functionality of what they used to use.

If you could sum up your feelings about and happiness for Teamwork Projects in three sentences, what would you say?

Jay Baer: Teamwork Projects consistently exceeds my expectations. It has totally changed the way our business works, and I can’t fathom how we used to get by without it!

Check back next week when we share more interviews with our customers in the field of Marketing for our September Industry of the Month. If you’re one of them, drop us a line at community@teamwork.com so we can interview you too!

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3 Comments

I am fascinated by this: “the ability to use task templates and have them work backwards from a completion date.” I was not aware this feature exists and, in fact, spend time wishing it did. I’m curious if there a Help doc or video explaining how this works. Also, will this feature automatically schedule sub-tasks in a template based upon a completion date for the parent task? Or does this backwards scheduling only work if the overall Project has a end date?

Oh. My. Goodness. I just found a Teamwork blog post from **June 2013** that announced template dates have become relative. How I missed that in all this time is a complete mystery to me. I guess I haven’t had to edit my templates in a while. ::chagrined::